You probably became aware of style guides while in school, when teachers used them to show the hard-and-fast rules of “proper” writing. And your liking or loathing of said style guides probably depends largely on how strict your teacher was in enforcing those rules.
But if you thought style guides were just for students, you would be sorely mistaken—writers of all types and genres can benefit from the accumulated wisdom found in their pages. But which style guide best fits your needs? Read on for a rundown of the Big Five.
The Chicago Manual of Style (CMoS)
This is the guide you’ve likely heard of if you’ve shopped your writing around, since it’s used in the book publishing world for both fiction and nonfiction manuscripts. Many writers, editors, and publishers can be found with this hefty tome on their desks (with about a million Post-it notes marking the most frequently used sections—or maybe that’s just me?) since it has the answer to about every single question you could possibly have about grammar, punctuation, and overall style.
In its seventeenth incarnation, CMoS has defined and clarified issues such as the placement of biographical notes; self-publishing agreements; the rules for abstracts and keywords when marketing; the distinction between epilogues and afterwords; and a ton more.
In case you couldn’t tell from those examples, CMoS is more than just a simple guide to grammar rules. It also gives a lot of information about the publishing process itself, including manuscript preparation, proofreading, citation, and formatting. If there’s one style guide you get as a self-published author, this is the one.
The Associated Press (AP)
Journalists use this style guide, whether reporting for newspapers, magazines, or broadcasting sources. Now in its fifty-sixth edition, the AP guide includes three hundred new or clarified entries about topics ranging from data journalism, business, religion, and sports terms to media law, news values, punctuation, polls and surveys, social media, and more.
More recently, AP style has expanded into the public relations and marketing spheres, so this is a great guide for those working in that realm. Its focus is on keeping writing straightforward, to the point, and simple. Add to that the fact that it’s probably one of the most common and well-known styles out there, and it all adds up to AP style being quite uncomplicated and user friendly.
American Psychological Association (APA)
This is for you business writers out there. APA (not to be confused with AP, mentioned above) is the go-to guide for scholarly writing in the fields of business, psychology, nursing, communications, engineering, and related subjects. It was kick-started in 1929 by a group of psychologists, anthropologists, and business managers who wanted to establish a common set of guidelines that would make the more technical aspects of science-related writing easier to read.
The big difference with the APA style guide is that it skips over the general rules of grammar and punctuation that are covered in style guides like CMoS. Instead, APA focuses specifically on the construction of manuscripts meant for publication in a scientific or business journal, as well as student papers written for those types of subjects.
Modern Language Association (MLA)
If you remember one style guide from your school years, it’s probably this one. Pretty much used only in academic settings (like those high school English classes of yore), MLA caters to the world of literature and humanities and is most widely used by scholars, academic writers, and academic publishers, as well as journal publishers.
While MLA and CMoS overlap in many ways, MLA tends to focus much more heavily on citation and documentation—which makes sense, considering it’s an academic-minded style. Often used in teaching, the MLA handbook is currently on its ninth edition and gives thorough explanations as to how to cite and document sources, in addition to detailed guidelines on scholarly writing and formatting academic manuscripts.
I would be remiss if I left out William Strunk Jr.’s 1918 masterpiece of simplistic style. Revised decades later by E. B. White (yes, the author of Charlotte’s Web), this slim volume has its champions for a reason: it’s short, concise, and holds clarity and simplicity above all as its number one rule for proper writing. With rules like “Put statements in positive form,” “Use active voice,” “In summaries, keep to one tense,” and “Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end,” almost any writer can get behind the ideas of Strunk and White.
Sometimes nicknamed the Little Book, this style guide is perfect for those who are looking for a bit of guidance in terms of manuscript writing but don’t want to get bogged down by chapters and chapters of intricate rules. This is the style guide that, to my mind at least, adheres most to the general notion of common sense when it comes to writing. It provides just a bit of a nudge toward best practices while allowing the author’s voice to shine through loud and clear.
If you’re writing for yourself, you may find it handy to keep one or more of these style guides nearby. (Good news if large, heavy books are not your thing: most of these style guides also have online subscription options with search features.) While you certainly don’t have to worry about a teacher marking a big red pen over your use of commas, the handbooks can be a useful tool to make your writing smoother, easier to read, and yes, grammatically correct.
Andrea Moran lives outside of Nashville. She’s a professional copywriter and editor who loves all things books. Find her on LinkedIn.
